Announcing the First Beta Release of Persona

http://identity.mozilla.com/post/32395255498/announcing-the-first-beta-release-of-persona

by callahad • 14 years ago

474 187 14 years ago

identity.mozilla.com

icebraining3• 14 years ago

Support for Persona in HN would be awesome...

fmarier8• 14 years ago

...and assuming it's written in Python (is it?), it should be pretty easy to do: https://github.com/mozilla/browserid-cookbook/blob/master/py...

icebraining3• 14 years ago

Nope, HN is written in Arc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)

don_draper• 14 years ago

One reason this looks good to me is that I trust Mozilla more than most organizations.

lmm• 14 years ago

Ideologically? Yes. Technically? Not so much.

j_col• 14 years ago

Why? Genuine question, do you think their security will be better?

ozten14• 14 years ago

The low level protocol - BrowserID - is a federated system, so the "they" in your question can be someone you trust (and Mozilla isn't hardcoded)

You can use any browser and if it has native support, it will do the client side crypto. It will store your public/private keys in the client.

You can use any Identity provider (email provider probably) and if they have native support, they will store you password and do 2 factor auth or whatever.

This removes websites (relaying parties) from the password storage business. All they get is an email address and a way to cryptographically check to see that you owned it.

The crypto that powers the BrowserID protocol is an open standard, so you can vet it. It's been designed by crypto experts in an open forum.

htmltablesrules3• 14 years ago

I don't trust any "organization" to store and manage my passwords. A single subpoena to mozilla for a divorce proceeding or whatever could unleash cascading consequences upon you.

ozten14• 14 years ago

The system is designed to allow your email provider or another Identity Provider that you trust, to store your password instead of Mozilla.

Your identity provider just has to implement the BrowserID protocol https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Persona/Identity_Pr...

clone1018• 14 years ago

Thank goodness Persona isn't a password manager then.

glassx2• 14 years ago

It's not really a "password manager", it uses signed assertions instead of plaintext passwords. It is similar to client certificates, but with a much better UI.

Plus, your keys are stored in the browser, according to callahad, so Mozilla doesn't have to know where you signed up: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4232774

Also, in the future you probably won't even need to contact Mozilla anywhere in the process: your browser will store your certificates for you, natively.

opendomain2• 14 years ago

I can not get Persona to work. I go to Mozilla developer network: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/ , see the login button and click on it and it redirects me back to the same page. I am using Firefox 15

ozten14• 14 years ago

The first run on MDN can be a little confusing.

Does it work for you on http://crossword.thetimes.co.uk/ ?

If not, we'd love to help identify your issue https://github.com/mozilla/browserid/issues/new

opendomain2• 14 years ago

Yea - there was nowhere for me to sign up. I think the problem may be the pop-up did not work on Firefox. I used Chrome and was able to create an account and then everything worked. I also tested on IE8 and had some javascript error, but just hit refresh twice and was able to login.

Too• 14 years ago

After reading the text twice and watching both videos i still have no clue what it actually does and how it solves the problem. I'm a few pages of skimming into the documentation now but there's no overview of what it actually does in the background.

Just a load of buzzwords and awesomeness!1 of how this will revolutionize my account management and how easy the API is.

Is it a password manager, a biometric system or some kind of account provider?

beefsack• 14 years ago

It's quite clever, essentially it's a system where your email address is your unique identifier, and you authenticate by clicking on a link sent to your email account.

The developer reference has much more information: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/persona

Evbn• 14 years ago

Isn't this basically the same as OpenID?

slajax• 14 years ago

My understanding is that it is designed to be a distributed variation to oAuth where you authenticate against an email address instead of a specific social account.

callahad16• 14 years ago

It's decentralized public-key based authentication, wrapped up in an extremely user- and dev-friendly package. Francois Marier did a good job of explaining it at Kiwi PyCon 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZBTc7iEkQY

(Think OpenID, but easier to use, easier to implement, and with better privacy protection.)

In brief: instead of a username and password at login, you get a user's email address and cryptographically signed assertion proving their ownership of that address. The assertions are ephemeral and scoped to your site, so once you verify it, you can set a session cookie and throw away the assertion. No more password column in your database, yet you still retain a direct relationship with your users.

Here's the underlying spec (working on getting it updated for Beta 1, but the principles are all there) https://github.com/mozilla/id-specs/blob/prod/browserid/inde...

htmltablesrules3• 14 years ago

>No more password column in your database...

Who has liability when a user of mine says their account got hacked? The email provider? My site? Mozilla?

If one of my users has $100 go missing from their account, then they are going to expect me to replace it, not the email provider, not mozilla. I don't like the idea of shifting security to a outside platform, because I still retain all the liability when things go bad, and they always will (key loggers, spyware...)

Sites that deal with financial transactions will be reluctant to adopt this for sure.

lifeisstillgood3• 14 years ago

Congratulations on this and thank you. The links are useful and I recommend the video-I got a proof of concept onto our staging servers whilst listening to the video - fantastic.

Can I suggest a clearer explanation in the quick start guide of loggedInEmail and it's options and that there is a comparison of the name supplied from the site and name inside the browser - it is a bit confusing to see onlogin get called without a button being pressed. I would suggest walking a dev through what to expect - the code examples are great but the quick start is written by someone who understands what's going on behind the scenes - there is a sentence About currentusr that completely floored me - I could not understand how I was supposed to know bob was logged in if that was the first time he arrived at the site. In the end I gave up and read the docs !

Edit - needed bigger text box on ipad

mmahemoff• 14 years ago

The original name, "Browser ID", made it clearer.

Basically, your browser knows your identity, so it can automatically authenticate you with any supporting website. You never have to set up an account with the website and you never have to enter a password.

That's my understanding of it anyway.

kumar3033• 14 years ago

in 5 years many people using the web will have no idea what you're talking about when you say "browser" :)

Zash• 14 years ago

It's like PKIX but with JSON.

nagnatron• 14 years ago

I would love to see this working.

riffraff• 14 years ago

the "check the documentation" link goes to https://developer.mozilla.org/it/Persona which 404s for me.

Maybe not redirecting based on user location by default is a good idea.

kalv• 14 years ago

Odd it worked for me and redirected to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Persona

callahad16• 14 years ago

Doh, I'll update the MDN links to go to the en-US locale by default. Sorry about that :(

petepete• 14 years ago

I thought [1] Mozilla Personas were themes?

[1] http://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/

Evidently I need to pay more attention.

timmclean2• 14 years ago

Used to be: http://identity.mozilla.com/post/18038609895/introducing-moz...

callahad16• 14 years ago

Someone needs to make a Persona Persona. We're our own worst SEO enemy :)

The Firefox themes were renamed to... background themes. It's just that the addons team (which owns getpersonas.org) has been hard at work on the new Mozilla Marketplace, and the Persona team has been hard at work on Persona. A few of the Persona devs are going to hack on this next month and try to get a disambiguation page deployed. We don't want theme-seekers to get lost, but we also don't want to lose people looking for the authentication system, so a straight 301 isn't ideal.

benatkin• 14 years ago

I told them that they need to rename it with a 301 several weeks ago. They haven't. sigh

netfire• 14 years ago

This link posted says they are looking to rename Personas to something different, but it doesn't look like its actually happened yet (or what it will be called). Given that the getpersonas.com website is still calling them Personas, I'd say the Personas name is still alive and well (and easily confused with the new Persona product)

kuida0r3• 14 years ago

Speaking of themes, how easy is it to customize the look&feel of the login prompt? It may be odd for the user to see an entirely different site when they try to sign-in to a site.

romaniv2• 14 years ago

I think the general idea of building better auth into browsers is a wonderful and highly necessary development. However, this implementation will completely fail if the user has JavaScript blocked and there is no fallback. And yes, this is a real issue. (Though I will probably get a lot of replies that try to dismiss it in various ways.)

callahad16• 14 years ago

That's a great point. Persona doesn't work well in non-JS, non-browser contexts, yet. The nice thing is that you can use it for progressive enhancement. Users have JS? Auth with Persona. Users don't have JS? Use a traditional email address / password system.

So long as you can associate email addresses with accounts on your backend, you can use Persona with the same database you have right now.

Johngibb• 14 years ago

Is there any way to use it for say an iPhone app interacting with web services authenticated as a user?

romaniv2• 14 years ago

Persona doesn't work well in non-JS, non-browser contexts, yet.

So are there built-in, HTML-only versions for this in the works? It seems it should be possible to build some of this functionality into the browser, making it work without JS.

The nice thing is that you can use it for progressive enhancement. Users have JS? Auth with Persona. Users don't have JS? Use a traditional email address / password system.

I wouldn't call that progressive enhancement. Depending on whether the client has JS enabled, they would go through entirely different registration and auithentication processes, using different credentials. That can be very confusing to the users.

Sidnicious• 14 years ago

I’m not in love with Persona because it puts everyone’s eggs in one basket.

I like OpenID because it works like email — choose whichever provider you fancy. If one goes sour or a nicer one pops up, websites don’t have to add support it before you can use it. And, websites can choose to expose nice “sign in with X” buttons instead of making you type in your OpenID address to sign in.

On the other hand, I realize that Mozilla has made big advances in ease-of-use (for users and developers). I just hope those advances turn into an open protocol someday.

P.S. I had a fleeting hope that they were announcing browser extensions (with a fallback to the way it works now). There’s still a risk of sketchy websites phishing for your Persona login.

- - -

All right, clearly I need to read some more docs. I apologize for making unfounded complaints against what seems to be a pretty darn awesome protocol.

callahad16• 14 years ago

> I like OpenID because it works like email — choose whichever provider you fancy.

Persona works like email because every identifier is an email address, not an opaque OpenID URL. You don't have to have the NASCAR-esque "Sign in with OpenID Provider X, Y, or Z" login page if users can actually use an identifier that that already know. :) (To be fair, OpenID Connect is working on fixing that problem)

> I just hope those advances turn into an open protocol someday.

You're in luck! :) The protocol is open and completely decentralized: https://github.com/mozilla/id-specs/blob/prod/browserid/inde...

Mozilla operates a few centralized services to solve the chicken-and-egg problem while bootstrapping, but they're completely optional, and they automatically fall away when a browser or email provider have native support for the BrowserID protocol.

waffle_ss• 14 years ago

> Persona works like email because every identifier is an email address, not an opaque OpenID URL. You don't have to have the NASCAR-esque "Sign in with OpenID Provider X, Y, or Z" login page if users can actually use an identifier that that already know.

OpenID URLs need not be opaque - I use my regular <realname>.com URL as my OpenID, and have a stub in the HTML of /index.html that points to the provider that I want to use when I authenticate (which I can change any time I please). It's called delegation. I think using DNS as an identifier is better than email (as that's kind of what it was built for), but not a viable option for the masses. Mozilla did a good job with Persona.

drivebyacct2• 14 years ago

What? You didn't even watch the video?

It's decentralized. It's an open protocol based on an older open protocol.

ww520• 14 years ago

I believe different providers other than Mozilla can host it, and you can use one of them instead of Mozilla. That works just like email hosting. Persona is an API-level protocol. Whoever implements it can host it. It just means the end users need to maintain a separate password entry with the other hosting provider.

scribu• 14 years ago

I can see why they're calling it a beta release. The UX during creating a profile on developer.mozilla.org has several rough edges. For example:

  1. Clicked "Sign In" and successfully create a Persona account.
  2. Created a profile on MDN, with the wrong user name (oops).
  3. Cancelled my Persona account in a separate tab.

I'm still logged in on MDN and the "Sign Out" button doesn't work now. After 5-10 minutes, I get a "Permission Denied" page, which is correct, but not exactly the expected workflow.

Also, LastPass doesn't seem to play well with Persona, but I'm hopeful it will in the future.

binarymax2• 14 years ago

Have been messing around with BrowserID since it first went public last year (with a node.js backend) and I love it. Its so much more straightforward to implement than oauth and openid, and the fact that it's tied to your email address is perfect. I'm definitely going to be using it as my primary auth system going forward. Great job Mozilla!

DASD5• 14 years ago

Do you have examples of sites that don't use Persona as the BrowserID implementation? I'd like to see how sites are handling the user prompt when there are going to be alternative providers to Mozilla's Persona service.

binarymax2• 14 years ago

No since what I do is pretty experimental side projects and fine to just use the persona end of things. Also I don't currently have anything public running right now myself (as it just entered beta so I won't release until v1.0).

If you haven't tried it out yet I encourage you to do so...it only took me 30 minutes to get up and running the first time around.

JoshTriplett4• 14 years ago

Doesn't work that way; Mozilla's Persona service just serves as a shim for browsers without native support for BrowserID. On browsers with native support, Mozilla's server won't get involved at all.

DASD5• 14 years ago

Are there any websites with implementations that don't prompt directly for Mozilla's site(i.e. asking for your preferred BrowserID provider)? I'd like to see how clunky the interface becomes when there are more providers(such as if I want to become my own provider) than just Mozilla. Is the user then confused by asking for a provider..ala OpenID? Am I correct in presuming Persona is an implementation of BrowserID?

I'm not likely to use this myself as this little gem from Mozilla's privacy policy (https://login.persona.org/privacy) gives me the shivers: "As part of the normal operation of the Persona service, Mozilla will retain a log of which sites you have disclosed your email to."

ozten14• 14 years ago

Go to https://eyedee.me and create an DASD account

Go to http://crossword.thetimes.co.uk/ - this is a non-Mozilla RP

Enter DASD@eyedee.com - This is a Primary Identity provider, source at [1]

So you see there is no BrowserID provider choosing screen, it's naturally part of the flow. you enter DASD@eyedee.com and the system checks for support and delegates to eyedee.com.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/eyedee.me

DASD5• 14 years ago

Thanks for posting the process flow. So (https://login.persona.org/sign_in) will always be shown? If so, then how is this truly decentralized with my privacy concerns mentioned above?

callahad16• 14 years ago

> Are there any websites with implementations that don't prompt directly for Mozilla's site

That's the OpenID model. BrowserID works somewhat differently. Your ID is an email address, so your provider is that email's domain. Because few domains support it directly yet, Mozilla operates an optional, centralized authority that can issue credentials to other users. But you don't have to use that if you add support on your own domain.

After that, the UI is also provided by Mozilla's cross-browser JS shim, but it's just a polyfill for `navigator.id.`. If your browser has native support for those methods (Firefox will, soon), then Mozilla's UI is completely uninvolved.

Basically, we're starting with a single, optional point of centralization: login.persona.org. As native support comes online from various domains and browsers, our central fallback will automatically drop out of the picture.

> Am I correct in presuming Persona is an implementation of BrowserID?*

Yep! BrowserID is the protocol, Persona is Mozilla's cross-browser UI and optional centralized services. It's kind of like how Google Login is really OpenID/OAuth under the hood, but more meta.

> "As part of the normal operation of the Persona service, Mozilla will retain a log of which sites you have disclosed your email to."

Yeah, that line sounds super bad. IIRC, it's a relic of a previous design of the cross-browser shim that needs to be removed. I'll follow up with Mozilla's legal folks.

DASD5• 14 years ago

Are there any browsers that currently implement BrowserID? I just fired up Firefox 15 and still get the pop-up for login.persona. Or links to near future impementations?

Thanks for you and otzen for shedding light on all of this.

aubergene• 14 years ago

Can I cname my own domain to a provider or something similar?

glassx2• 14 years ago

Interesting changes to the API. We now have an observer API, instead of just a function that invokes the login window.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/DOM/navigator.id

I believe this merges the old BrowserID Session Management parts with Persona, or am I wrong?

callahad16• 14 years ago

Yep! The Observer API does session management automatically. (Some folks don't want that, so the previous `.get()` API is still available.)

dmthompson• 14 years ago

Awesome work by Mozilla. I've added this to a small project of mine, and it was super simple and fast to do. I really excited to see this gain traction.

sandGorgon2• 14 years ago

What is the self-hosted equivalent of this ? I have been struggling with this problem quite a bit.

I have a bunch of web apps which are quite a bit different - off the shelf forum software, wordpress, custom code, etc. - and I want to tie them all together using a single signon. What should I be using ? I distrust myself enough to know that I would prefer not rolling my own security protocol.

I know that there are solutions like Kerberos, etc. but is it really practical for a bunch of websites running on Rackspace + EC2 ?

ozten14• 14 years ago

Which pieces do you care about being self-hosted?

If you use Persona on all your sites, it feels very much like SSO.

I use the browserid plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/browserid/) on my personal Wordpress site.

We actually had an SSO project based on CAS v2, which we killed because Persona was a better solution.

sandGorgon2• 14 years ago

I agree about the Persona bit, but many times you are not ... shall we say "allowed" to.

Since you built an SSO, could you point me in the right direction amongst self-hosted solutions. Some comparisons and pitfalls would be most welcome.

Tipzntrix• 14 years ago

I wonder if this will be developed into a standard, or whether Mozilla will have to be the only ones operating this service.

ozten14• 14 years ago

BrowserID Protocol Spec

https://github.com/mozilla/id-specs/blob/prod/browserid/inde...

forgotusername2• 14 years ago

I really want to believe in something like this, however you'd getting much better traction by explaining a few key details:

* What the hell does the JS assertion object look like?

* How do I run an independent service?

* In a single page, walk me through the steps to integrate?

Videos, dodgy music, overenthusiastic PFYs appeal to me much less than good documentation

callahad16• 14 years ago

> What the hell does the JS assertion object look like?

Needs to be updated a little bit, but check out the spec: https://github.com/mozilla/id-specs/blob/prod/browserid/inde...

Note: You don't have to implement this yourself! You can POST assertions to https://verifier.login.persona.org/verify instead, and we'll return a JSON blob that lets you know if it was valid or not. Or you could run that same verifier locally (it's a stateless node.js server, code's on github in the mozilla/browserid repo). The exact data formats are still in flux (waiting / hoping for IETF standardization around some crypto things), so we don't recommend doing verification yourself just yet, unless you run our node.js verifier and frequently update it. We'll get that stuff locked down in one of the next Beta releases.

> How do I run an independent service?

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Persona/Implementin...

> In a single page, walk me through the steps to integrate?

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Persona/Quick_Setup

forgotusername2• 14 years ago

Huh :) I went in circles on the MDN site for a few minutes.

Osiris2• 14 years ago

I just tried it on the Times Crossword page. The workflow is really simple and elegant. I put in my email address. It took a second to determine there was no Persona account, then asked for me to create a password. After that, I clicked on an authorization link in my email account and as soon as I did that it immediately logged me in. I clicked Log out and back in again and it immediately recognized me and logged me in.

This is really what I was hoping to see with OpenID when it came out, but the process to set up an account and get started is much more cumbersome.

I look forward to seeing native support for Persona in browsers.

notatoad3• 14 years ago

It does seem a pretty elegant way to log in, the only concern i have is that it's kind of unclear what password i needed to use to login. I had already created a browserID password at some point in the past, so when i went to the times crossword and clicked sign in, i was prompted for a password. my first thought was maybe i had already signed up for the times crossword, so i tried the password i probably would have used to sign up for a site like that. nope, but it said "authenticating with your email provider". So then i tried my email password, thinking maybe it was integrating with my google account. nope. Third try was the password i had used to sign up for persona.

Maybe in the future, if this sees wide adoption, they can get away with just putting some mozilla branding in the corner, but for now there should really be some explanatory text on the login window telling you that you need to enter the password you created for mozilla persona, or this is just going to confuse users.

Osiris2• 14 years ago

They've already stated that you'll be able to put your site logo and name into the login box [1].

As far as the password, I thought it was pretty clear that the password they are asking for is your Persona password, but maybe that's because I had just signed up.

The point is that you'll only ever need one password, so it'll be great to be able to have one strong password rather than tens of weaker ones.

[1] http://identity.mozilla.com/post/32395255498/announcing-the-...

fmarier8• 14 years ago

Thanks, that's really good feedback.

I've pasted your comments into a bug report: https://github.com/mozilla/browserid/issues/2539

Feel free to jump in if you have ideas on how we can phrase this better.

Flenser• 14 years ago

Perhaps making signing in to websites really simple, in a way that verifies the users email address to the site, isn't a good idea. Once it's widely adopted spammers will start using it.

JakeSc5• 14 years ago

My major concern with this, beside the eggs-in-one-basket issue, is that this places even more value on my email account.

Years ago, my email account was simply used for exchanging short pieces of text with acquaintances and companies. Now it's the central key to all my authentication sessions and finances, and therefore presents a huge target for attackers.

I've been looking for ways to reduce the risk associated with losing access to my email account, should that ever happen. Yet for all its benefits, Persona still places yet more importance on protecting my single email password.

graue2• 14 years ago

You could say the same about any traditional username/password signup that sends a confirmation email and allows you to reply to an email to reset your password. Ultimately, that's just relying on the security of your email, too. So while you are correct that Persona doesn't solve that problem, it doesn't make that problem any worse compared to the default option of an email-confirmed username and password.

infinite8s• 14 years ago

I think that's what the parent post was getting at. Originally email was just used for exchanging messages, now that most sites use it to authenticate a user there is a much higher cost to losing access/having it hacked.

JakeSc5• 14 years ago

Yes, most authenticated web services offer a "forgot password" option, and their security is thus tied to your email account. However, each one of these decentralized services on its own is not as valuable as the entire ecosystem of Persona-enabled sites will be.

That is, the Persona "forgot password" is a single point of failure which, if compromised, can provide access to a whole ecosystem of sites. And it will be tied to your email account.

gambler2• 14 years ago

Considering that it's a new protocol, why not try to solve that old problem? At the very least, they could allow you to disable email-based password reset in favor of printed code. That would be a smart thing to do.

You would get a random code or several codes you print out and put into a safe place. If you ever forgot your password, you would dig it our and supply to the website to trigger a reset (which could include or not include email-based verification). The codes would only be usable for passwords resets.

dochtman• 14 years ago

Persona, the protocol, doesn't actually rely on your email account's password. It uses the domain from your email account to figure out how to authenticate you; if you want to use some other way than via your email, that's fine.

weaksauce3• 14 years ago

The password that I create when I setup persona is for what exactly? It doesn't seem to be used at all after the creation a persona.

JakeSc5• 14 years ago

That's correct. However, the security of any Persona-enabled site is tied to your email account's security through Persona "forgot password".

This is my concern; a compromised email account means a compromise of your account on every Persona-enabled site.

gbhn• 14 years ago

I think the ship has mostly sailed on email -- most sites use email password recovery, so that choice isn't up to you unless you get a different email address for each site.

You should definitely use 2-factor authentication for your email!

JakeSc5• 14 years ago

> I think the ship has mostly sailed on email

You're right. Gmail does an excellent job with ensuring account integrity. I've lost and subsequently recovered access to Gmail accounts, and I must say they do it right. And like you said, I especially appreciate their two-factor auth.

I hope lay people are coming to realize the security importance of their email accounts.

fletchowns• 14 years ago

People simply need to be very very careful about protecting their email account. Use two factor authentication, use a PIN on your smartphone, don't type your email address password on random internet cafe computers, etc.

gambler2• 14 years ago

No. Websites should stop outsourcing their security to third parties they know nothing about (such as email providers). It's not just a matter of immediate security, but overall architecture quality as well. Having your entire digital life depend on an account that, for most people, is hosted by a third party, for free and without any guarantees is dumb. Email simply wasn't mean for that kind of use.

Ygg2• 14 years ago

This is just great. I do hope this replaces Facebook connect as authentication provider, though I doubt it since getting all that user info is priceless for most sites using Facebook connect.

It looks very lovely.

latchkey3• 14 years ago

I don't think it'll replace Facebook, it'll just be an alternative to it. We've integrated both Persona and Facebook into our site and it works great.

For my business, we need more personal details about each person that we get by default with Facebook (name/age/sex). So, that integration will always be cleaner than Persona because it is just a few clicks.

We've been working with BID/Persona for a while now (we're linked from the /about page) and we're huge fans. If you want to play around with it... https://www.voo.st/

JoshTriplett4• 14 years ago

I've seen some preliminary discussions of linking personal information to a Persona and optionally supplying it to the site at login time. If you have a need for that, you should chat with the Persona/BrowserID developers.

SODaniel• 14 years ago

Seems pretty interesting, though I have to say that watching only the introduction video gives you basically NO IDEA of what the product solves or how.

kin• 14 years ago

how does it work with multiple users using the same browser?

fmarier8• 14 years ago

When you click the "Sign in with Persona" button on a website, the dialog that pops up has a "This is not me" button which logs out the current user and allows you to login with a different email.

sabret00the2• 14 years ago

Have the fixed the fact that it doesn't support autofilling passwords? That alone makes it more annoying than any captcha that I've ever had to fill out.

sabret00the2• 14 years ago

Find it hilarious that this got marked down and yet it's something Mozilla have spent the last week moving towards getting this fixed.

egfx• 14 years ago

Oh, This is perfect. Today was Persona implementation day for the project I'm working on and now this announcement comes. This is great for a developer area login.

benlower• 14 years ago

What if I don't want a site to know my email address? I currently create unique email addresses for each site. How do I do that with Persona?

d0m• 14 years ago

I'm fairly new to persona too, but when you "sign in" it lets you choose what email address to use.

timmclean2• 14 years ago

It looks like it'd be pretty easy to continue that practice -- just verify more than one email address, and pick the correct one when signing into each site. Try it here: http://myfavoritebeer.org/

Also, there are Mailinator-like services: https://mockmyid.com/

seanmonstar2• 14 years ago

Exactly. And there's even this service that tries to automate this into Persona: https://github.com/nmalkin/janus

spoletto• 14 years ago

If I understand correctly, the browser stores a certificate that proves you own your email address. These certificates are only valid for a certain amount of time, even if you check that you own this computer. So what happens when your cert expires? Do you have to go back to your email and re-click the link that gives you a new cert to be stored in your browser?

Also, if I'm using a public computer, is there a way for me to manually revoke a cert when I'm done using the machine? It seems that even a 1hr expiry is too long for this case.

callahad16• 14 years ago

This is the part that gets kind of confusing because there isn't a clear delineation between Persona the UI and Persona the fallback identity provider (IdP).

When your cert expires, you need to get a new one from your IdP. If you already have an active session with your IdP (either by logging into your webmail, or clicking the "this is my computer" button for Mozilla's fallback), then your browser can get a new cert completely invisibly.

If your session and your cert have expired, then you get prompted to authenticate again. For the Persona fallback, this means you'll be prompted for your Persona password (instead of sending you back to your email, because that's super annoying and users end up not logging into your site). If your email provider has native support for Persona, then you'll get prompted by them however they normally do login.

> I'm using a public computer, is there a way for me to manually revoke a cert when I'm done using the machine?

Go to login.persona.org and click "sign out." We're working on universal signout (at least for users of the fallback), but I'm not sure if that's landed in production yet.

bwood2• 14 years ago

Thanks for the detail, I really like what I see with Persona so far.

bwood2• 14 years ago

I get the impression that verifying your email address only needs to be done once when you first sign up with Persona and create a password. When you use Persona to log in to a site for the first time in that browser, it prompts you for your Persona password and issues a certificate on success. If that certificate expires, I presume you would have to use your password again with Persona to get a new certificate.

I haven't found anything about manually revoking a cert, but I haven't looked either.

fmarier8• 14 years ago

In the case of the Javascript shim, the certificates are stored in the browser's local storage. In Firefox (and I believe in most other browsers), this gets deleted when you clear cookies.

So you can do that before you leave that public computer, or you can use private browsing / incognito mode so that cookies and local storage stay in RAM and disappear when you exit.

BryanB55• 14 years ago

This seems to be a nice solution if you are on your own home/work computer and have your email open. They didn't really explain much on HOW it works but the problem I'm seeing is that if I am at a public computer and want to login I have to log in to my email account first and click on the persona link. I guess the benefit here is that I only need to remember 1 password (my email address password) but my email password is usually a 50 character random string that I don't like entering on public computers if I even could.

So if I want to log in to a crossword puzzle I almost feel like I have to compromise my email password which is much more valuable, if say the public computer has a key logger or something.

Maybe I'm over thinking. I could see how this would be useful if I have my desktop mail client running and just click a link to log in though.

zerostar076• 14 years ago

Then you would not use your primary "super secure" email as your browserId, but a secondary mail account.

loumf2• 14 years ago

The most valuable thing about your email account is that it's your password recovery mechanism. What ever email account you use for password recovery or logging into things becomes the "super secure" email account.

There is no message in my email that I care more about than the one that might give you access to my bank accounts.

icebraining3• 14 years ago

That's what two-factor auth is for.

stdbrouw• 14 years ago

That's not really how it works. You verify your email address once, and after that you can just log in with your address and password. You don't have to click on an email link every single time you log in.

StavrosK• 14 years ago

You can have a provider that requires no auth. Try entering whatever@mockmyid.com as an address.

mey2• 14 years ago

Am I entirely missing something, but once a password is selected, is there no way to change it?

mey2• 14 years ago

Apparently you can by going to http://persona.org

fmarier8• 14 years ago

You can manage your account (e.g. change password, remove emails) by signing into https://login.persona.org .

qikquestion• 14 years ago

Let me add my understanding. Please correct me if it is wrong.

Actual user case if everything is in place:

1. you are in a website using browserid protocol/persona (eg. http://crossword.thetimes.co.uk/)

2.hit the login link. Give your email address (superuser123@gmail.com or superuser123@yahoo.com)

3.it prompts for your password - gmail password or yahoo password

4.post authentication it takes you to the website with user session as superuser123@gmail.com/superuser123@yahoo.com - eg crossword.thetimes.co.uk

5.In a nutshell, end user doesn't need to create a new userid & password for using the website, as long as he knows his emailuserd/emailpassword

Present use case - since few things are missing

1. you are in a website using browserid protocol/persona (eg. http://crossword.thetimes.co.uk/)

2.hit the login link. since gmail & yahoo as email providers not implemented browserid/persona protocol, you will asked to create an account in persona.org with any of your existing email address.(gmail / yahoo).

persona.org will send you a verification link to check if you really own your email address. Click on the verification link and you are verified to use persona.org account in all the places where browserid is supported

3.in the login page - it prompts for a new password if you are a new user or existing password if you are a returning user - this is the password for the email address used in persona.org registration.

4.post authentication it takes you to the website with user session as superuser123@gmail.com/superuser123@yahoo.com - eg crossword.thetimes.co.uk

5.In a nutshell, two things will change in future - no login window from persona.org & no need to create account in persona.org

callahad16• 14 years ago

That's completely spot on. Right now, if your email provider doesn't have native support, we ask you to create a persona.org account so that Mozilla can vouch for you. In the future, this goes away.

Similarly, the UI is all displayed in response to navigator.id.* functions. If a browser implements those natively, the Persona UI at login.persona.org completely goes away.

The more successful Persona is, the less Mozilla is involved in the login process. :)

zerostar076• 14 years ago

So if i signup now with my @gmail account through persona.org, what happens when google starts supporting browserid natively?

fmarier8• 14 years ago

> 3.it prompts for your password - gmail password or yahoo password

Yes. In this case the "it" that prompts for your password will be an iframe served from gmail/yahoo. Once they support Persona natively, login.persona.org is no longer in the loop and your gmail/yahoo password goes directly to gmail/yahoo.

motti• 14 years ago

Having the (say) GMail in an iframe sounds worrying. It's not clear immediately that the embedded page came from GMail, as we cannot see the https scheme in the URL for the iframe - much less any indication that the certificate is trusted etc. This provides an attacker with the possibility to create a fake GMail login page

Why not redirect to GMail (openid-style) with a callback (or failing that, use a pop-up)?

johnkchow6• 14 years ago

I personally feel the pain point of password/identity management across different websites, and I'm using LastPass to help. While LastPass's browser integration is great, its UX is... lacking. Mozilla's strategy to associate Firefox browser with identity is IMO awesome and the first sign that it's pioneering vs reacting to Chrome (before this news, I've always viewed Firefox as Chrome's successful but still little brother in terms of features, polish, performance, support, etc.).

BUT (and this is a big "but" I feel), this is contingent with their execution of browser integration. W/O rock solid browser integration with fluid UX, this would just add noise to identity services and cause more consumer confusion.

Ultimately, I'm rooting them on because a) I'm concerned about my security and b) I have too many passwords and c) I'm hella lazy.

donrhummy4• 14 years ago

Persona doesn't require any browser integration. It works in all browsers that implement local storage. So it works via modern Javascript.

johnkchow6• 14 years ago

I'm sure Firefox will release a Firefox plugin that will complement the basic service of identification. Imagine a plugin that lists all the websites you can authenticate with Persona. Or what if you had multiple personas, the firefox plugin can help you manage the selection of personas. Eventually, it'd become baked into Firefox, giving users that sense of it fundamentally "safer" than other browsers. Sure, this is all speculation, but it's a good marketing strategy on Mozilla's end and the start of gaining back the average consumer market share.

fmarier8• 14 years ago

Can you be more specific as to how you find the UX lacking?

Getting UX right is a priority for Persona.

johnkchow6• 14 years ago

I was referring to LastPass's Chrome extension specifically, not Persona's UX. Sorry for the confusion.

asymmetric• 14 years ago

This looks really great. Only problem I see is the lack of support for IE 6 and 7, and it seems they won't be in the future. Anybody knows why that is?

callahad16• 14 years ago

The Persona cross-browser support shim needs window.postMessage and the HTML5 storage APIs, which IE 7 doesn't have. Working around it didn't seem worth the security and maintainability cost to the codebase, nor the opportunity cost over working on other features.

betterth• 14 years ago

I dislike that a Google search for "Mozilla Persona" returns Firefox Personas first, meaning that Mozilla now has 'Persona' and 'Personas' projects that are totally and completely unrelated to one another.

Something has to give because if it confuses a Hacker News reader, it's going to go completely over the head of the average computer user.

zerostar076• 14 years ago

Supposedly, end users will only face the "login with browserid" buttons. But yeah, i find the name change from browserid to Persona, as first time users will be confused.

donrhummy4• 14 years ago

Can someone explain how this is distributed and not using a central "authority"? I know it caches things locally, but it still requires Mozilla's Persona.org servers, correct? And you need a password that Mozilla stores, so aren't their servers still vulnerable? And couldn't (dumb) people still choose "123456" as their persona password? I understand that this makes the sites with crappy security implementations better, but some of the weaknesses are still there, right?

tofumatt• 14 years ago

I believe the aim is to have email providers be able to auth your persona email instead of Mozilla, but Mozilla exists as a sort of polyfill if the provider (eg. hotmail.com, gmail.com, your-custom-domain.net) doesn't do persona yet.

Also, yes: people can still choose crummy passwords. Personally, I don't think the appeal is in better security; it's convenience of single sign-on without it being tied to a. identity or b. Facebook (or twitter or google or whatever other service that harvests my data).

donrhummy4• 14 years ago

Right, but the email providers are only authenticating you to Persona. As far as the websites using Persona are concerned, it's persona.org that authenticates you.

And the appeal that Mozilla is pushing is definitely better security (as well as a distributed security authentication versus one for-profit authority - I definitely trust Mozilla MUCH more than Facebook or twitter, but it's still a central authority). You can especially see this in the talk they gave introducing it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZBTc7iEkQY

kumar3033• 14 years ago

It's fully distributed because the identity provider is your email domain. When joe@gmail.com logs in, gmail.com could be the only server that the system interacts with! This is described here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Persona/.well-known... Gmail may or may not choose to become an identity provider. That's ok too. In that case, a secure Mozilla server (with a sane privacy policy) will broker the email verification instead and thus can vouch for the user's identity.

zerostar076• 14 years ago

I don't know if it's appropriate but can we list some of websites where one can login through browserID? I 'm a big fan of browserID, and would gladly beta test your integration.

jedp3• 14 years ago

Sure thing. In addition to many of Mozilla's own sites, here are some examples:

- Times Crossword: http://crossword.thetimes.co.uk/

- Openphoto: http://current.openphoto.me/

- Voost: https://www.voo.st/

Our test application is this notepad application: http://123done.org/ (which you can clone from github)

zerostar076• 14 years ago

Been using it for a while on http://noteplz.com/ too

johnkchow6• 14 years ago

As a user I definitely appreciate the emphasis of privacy first as well as its clear responsibility for identification. However, from how I see it on the surface, it currently doesn't have the market reach as, say, FB Connect or Google, and I don't want to "flood" my users with too many options for authentication. What's the practical arguments of rolling out my own authentication (Rails + Devise) vs using Personas?

callahad16• 14 years ago

It's available to any user with an email address -- you don't have to limit yourself to users that have, and are willing to use, a Facebook or Google account.

Versus rolling your own, you don't have the friction of account creation / password management for new user signups if the user has ever used Persona before, and we'll be dramatically improving first-contact before the end of the year. You can completely forget about storing passwords. You don't have to send email verifications or handle forgotten passwords.

johnkchow6• 14 years ago

Ah so true, email verifications and forgotten passwords can become a hassle. Thanks for the insight callahad.

AndrewDucker• 14 years ago

I'm hoping that a large email provider (like gmail) will support this soon.

Getting providers onboard with this will be the make or break factor. And I'd really like it to succeed.

zachinglis• 14 years ago

That intro video really doesn't explain much. I know it takes 15 minutes to integrate into my site, and works with any browser, but I have no idea why I truly want to spend those 15 minutes doing so.

lifeisstillgood3• 14 years ago

Got it spliced into the site i am working on, checked in to github, and my laptop crashes. Karma oh karma.

This looks great, I got an identity service plugged in in hours, into a OSS website and this will kick openids bottom.

Brilliant - Mozilla is hitting some incredible high notes right now

ozten14• 14 years ago

I'm seriously digging the positive, participation and hacking vibe in these comments!

The web and OSS is so amazing.

astro1138• 14 years ago

Beta? I've made my own persona years ago: http://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/persona/95515

pablocubico• 14 years ago

For those of you asking, you can find some more background on how BrowserID here:

http://lloyd.io/how-browserid-works

_urga• 14 years ago

Does Persona do MFA?

olivier1664• 14 years ago

As far as I understand http://lloyd.io/how-browserid-works , the browser will hold a "certificate of ownership of the email". Since browser do not yet implement Persona, it is done in javascript with https://login.persona.org/include.js .

I do not yet understand what prevent me to steal these 'certificate of ownership of the email' by creating a web site with my own version of 'include.js'. In this malicious version, the "Assertion Generation" also send the private key to the server. After that, the server can uses the user login as he wants. It seems there is a timeout, but it allow the malicious server to log so long the time out is not ellapsed. Where I'am wrong?

Announcing the First Beta Release of Persona

Related Stories